Africa is estimated at currently having a smartphone penetration of between 17 – 19%. Data analysts (and other well placed tech enthusiasts) *cough cough* have projected a growth by about double (to between 40 – 42%) by 2018. Analysts say Africa will hit the 1 Billion smartphone subscriber digit by end of 2015.

Kenya currently has 4 main mobile operators namely Safaricom, Airtel, Yu and Orange. Safaricom, currently the leader of this pack, had announced that it will stop selling feature phones in favour of affordable smartphones as part of its offering to its customers.

During February’s Mobile Web East Africa (MWEA 2013) conference in Nairobi, Nzioka Waita, Corporate Affairs Director at Safaricom, mentioned expressly that Safaricom is soon going to stop selling low price point (read cheap) feature phones in all retail outlets. Safaricom will start to introduce and sel Read more »

BlackBerry today announced they would have an update to enable ‘tap sharing’ on their devices.

During his keynote presentation at the GITEX conference in Dubai, Research In Motion Co-CEO Jim Balsillie unveiled a new way for BlackBerry® smart-phone users to connect with one another and share multimedia content.

The announcement comes just weeks after the Smartphone manufacturer released their latest Operating System, BB OS7, and made it available on the newer BlackBerry smart-phones. Read more »

Huawei, a leader in providing innovative telecommunication solutions for operators around the world today announced the introduction of Huawei IDEOS™ S7 Slim tablet in the Kenyan market, three months after the introduction of its first tablet Huawei IDEOS™ S7 tablet.

The Huawei IDEOS™ S7 Slim made first appearance at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona in February, and as its name suggests is a slimmer and fitter version of the original Huawei IDEOS™ S7.

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Research In Motion (RIM) will soon be launching the gold release of the BlackBerry Theme Studio 6, a free and powerful device personalization suite of tools that includes the Theme Builder for creating themes, and the BlackBerry Composer for creating animations and graphics to use in themes.

This new release of Theme Studio makes it even easier for users and professional designers to customize virtually everything, including backgrounds, sound effects and ringtones, icons and menus, and fonts. You can even add animations and screen transitions.

This comes amid a more recent revelation that Blackberry developers would be able to download the SDK’s for completing the APIs related to the device enabling many developers to become ambitious and creative on the programming front. Read more »

BBM (BlackBerry Messenger) Social Platform officially goes into public beta.

This means that the BlackBerry developer community can now take advantage of the powerful social aspects of the ultra popular BBM service (an active user base of over 35 million). The BBM Social Platform was first announced at the BlackBerry DEVCON 2010 (http://press.rim.com/release.jsp?id=4555).

Enhanced Developer Experience – Empowering features

With this beta release, Java developers have access to APIs and features that allow them to build important functions into their applications. They are user permission based and include accessing and updating fields in the user’s profile, creating custom areas within the user’s profile, initiating and embedding chats with friends, initiating file transfers, sharing applications virally with friends in their contact list. Read more »

Much of the discussion of security threats to mobile phones revolves around smartphones, but researchers have found that less advanced “feature phones,” still used by the majority of people around the world, also are vulnerable to attack.

Feature phones have Web browsing, MP3 players, and other programs standard voice-only phones lack, but they have less computing power and feature integration than smartphones. Read more »